The editors I’ve been using – which one is your favorite?

Therefore, I thought I’d list the editors I’ve been using over the years. I remember dabbling around with a few and trying to understand them, but this list is made up of editors that I’ve been using extensively:

Ah, good ol’ HomeSite. You never forget your first real editor that you used for your creations. It was later bought by MacroMedia and then, in 2009, it was retired. Its creator, Nick Bradbury, wrote a bit about that in HomeSite Discontinued. I also sometimes used TopStyle, also created by Nick, as a complement to HomeSite – and that one is actually still alive!

When I had used TextMate for a long time, a number of developers told me I should really get into Vim, where MacVim seemed like the most suitable alternative. I tried, really hard, with it for about 6 months; learned a lot, but eventually went back to TextMate.

I also do like to dabble around with various editors, to see what I like, get another perspective on workflow and general inspiration. One thing I’m toying around with there is Atom from GitHub, and I look forward to testing it more as well.

Which editor are you using?

It would be very interesting and great if you’d like to share in the comments which editor you are using, and why you prefer it! Or with which editor you started your developer career!

I tried Notepad++ a bit WAY back, but not for an extensive period. Visual Studio, at least back then, was not very nice as an editor (but yes, it had benefits as a complete environment for .NET development).

I’m still “stuck” on TextMate 2. I just can’t let go of some of the text editing features I’m so accustomed to. I’ve given Sublime at least three tries, but I can never warm up to its text only configuration system. That, and it does not really feel native enough. Atom seemed like a nice candidate right up until I found out it’s entirely made out of HTML, CSS and JavaScript running in a Chrome browser (I mean, whaaaa…?) It also didn’t feel native enough because of this.

Now, I know that TextMate seems almost dead in the water. Sure, they issue updates every now and then, and they’ve even entered the beta stage as of last week. But most bundles that I use (like the HTML and CSS ones) feel incredibly of out date (No syntax highlighting for the main element? Come on!) I don’t know. Maybe I’ll give Sublime a try again, for the fourth time… 😛

Regarding Atom, well not really. This spring it felt really sluggish (which they have fixed since). Also the occasional broken plugin that throws up the Chrome console also gave a little bad taste in my mouth. I guess my reasoning is that there’s other techniques out there that are so much more suitable to build desktop applications with than HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but clearly others don’t agree with me. 🙂

I’ve been using Brackets ever since they got somewhat stable Linux support. (I’ve done a decent amount of work on CodeMirror and I am willing and able to make sacrifices to help move the web forward, so I’m a bit biased.) But, it’s the best non-IDE editor I’ve used. And every day more extensions are being written that get it closer and closer to being my perfect editor. And let’s be honest, the live preview is pretty sweet. (Primarily PHP/HTML/CSS/JavaScript use.)

I also use Sublime Text on occasion when a particular feature is lacking in Brackets (eg, multiline regex replace).

Yeah, they are rather responsive (and have an issue open about it). They just have a lot on their plate, especially with the upcoming 1.0 release. And it’s mostly non-code files I need the functionality for (eg, clearing error logs of errors as I fix them), so it isn’t too big of a deal for me if it isn’t built in right away.

MS-DOS – MultiEdit 4.0: It was the first text editor with
– unlimited undo
– unlimited number and size of files
– session restore (don’t forget, there were no multitask)
and many more. The editor itself was written in a propietary Pascal-like language, then later versions in a propietary C-like language, source code was available in Pro version. The stuff fits in a single HD floppy (1.44 Mbyte), the install first copied the source to the HDD, then compiled it, it was amazing.

MS-Windows – PSPad: it knows everything a developer needs. When I decided to switch to Linux desktop (also I was using Linux on console, as virtual machine: CoLinux) I made a list of Windows programs which I was using, to find Linux replacements. PSPad was the last on the list, I loved it, it was hard to stroke its name on the list.

GNU/Linux: Geany as primary, Leafpad for smaller things, and of course vi on console (I’m too old to call it vim).

Despite very half-hearted attempts I’ve never learned to use a hardcore editor like Vim, so my timeline goes something like
[DOS stuff]
Kate
Eclipse (an editor much like USS George Washington is a boat)
Xcode
Coda
Sublime

I do love sublime. Coda is good looking (and has a nice plugin api) but not very performant.

Komodo IDE (or Komodo Edit) – supports multiple languages, and is great for web development. Build on top of Firefox code base – so utilizes the Firefox extension mechanism and uses a similar JS/XUL ui.

Yes Multiple Selection is great. That is however, also available in Atom, Vim through a plugin and more. I think Sublime Text is great, but when it comes to performance – especially working with large files – nothing has been close to Vim in my experience.

I used GEdit first when I started writing PHP, then used Komodo Edit, went back to GEdit, and then finally taught myself to use vim. It involved a lot of cussing and pain, but been happy with vim for the last 3 years 🙂